Last week, I was in Nairobi, Kenya with the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) and their Kenyan partners from a wide variety of organisations, including civil society organisations and business membership associations from across Kenya. I was delivering a two-day training workshop on monitoring, evaluation and communication, how to use technology for those M&E and advocacy activities, and how to think about digital security.

CIPE strengthens democracy worldwide through private enterprise and market reforms. In Kenya, it works with partners to build policy and regulatory reform and provide services to regional members. Since Kenya’s devolution and decentralisation of government launched in 2013, CIPE’s Kenya partners have been working with their audience at a local level to ensure that local governments are accountable to their citizens.

The 17 workshop participants were particularly interested in getting citizens involved in local government processes, getting their opinions on issues that concern them, disseminating important information to them, gathering citizen-generated data and opinions, and giving citizens a voice. Clearly, there is a big role for technology to play, and the training included polling tools for SMS such as TextIt to gather and disseminate information, data collection with survey tools such as Google Forms or SurveyMonkey, building communication and social media strategies using Twitter and Facebook, and making using backend Twitter and Facebook analytics as another form of M&E. We also covered digital security and privacy, and looked at using secure encrypted messaging tools such as Signal, or encrypted email or cloud storage tools such as ProtonMail or SpiderOak.

I am a big believer in the importance of getting real, hands-on experience in using tools like this, and participants spent time building their own polls and surveys for their audience. I’m also a big believer in putting yourself in the shoes of the user - and we were reminded of the reality of what digital access and use (and barriers to that access and use) really means for many of CIPE’s audience members across Kenya several times during the workshop, when the internet cut out for extended periods of time, making it difficult to use some of these tools.

Although Kenya, as the land of m-Pesa, is often seen as a tech paradise and a fertile test bed for digital innovation, not everyone has equal access and opportunities to use technology and ICT statistics for Kenya are somewhat surprising. While 92% of the population has access to a mobile phone, only 44% have a smartphone, and only 14% are active social media users, with women having less access to internet than men. For participants, it was a reminder that in more rural areas or for low income groups, access to a mobile phone or even access to reliable internet and mobile networks is not automatic. This point was hammered home even more when mobile operator Safaricom’s networks also went down nationwide for almost a whole day, and millions of people found themselves unexpectedly digitally excluded - meaning that not only could people not make calls, send SMS or use data, but they also couldn’t use m-Pesa, a big issue in Kenya where paying for things through m-Pesa is becoming more common than cash. Kenyan Twitter was alight with users complaining that they hadn’t been able to pay for any food or goods all day because they rarely carry cash anymore.

For me, Kenya’s ICT stats and the Safaricom situation are good examples of the juxtaposition of digital access and use in Kenya. On the one hand, more sophisticated services like m-Pesa are omnipresent, starting to replace cash, and Kenya leads East Africa, if not all of Africa, in innovation. But on the other hand, internet penetration growth was 0% in 2016, and 66% of the adult population don’t have a smartphone. One of the outcomes of the CIPE workshop was participants realising this, and making plans to first understand their audience’s digital landscape and then design their technology use accordingly.

I am typing this out from Jomo Kenyatta Airport in Nairobi reflecting on the past week spent with the good people of UN Habitat, specifically those associated with the CityRAP tool. The CityRAP tool trains city managers and municipal technicians in small to intermediate sized cities in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) to understand and plan actions aimed at reducing risk and building resilience through the elaboration of a City Resilience Action Plan.

A few caveats at the onset here. This reads a bit more like an academic piece which it largely is. It is drawn from something larger I wrote a bit ago for another paper. It might also read like an attack on the SDGs, which is not my point. The point here is that the SDGs have generated some incredible results and I sincerely support them, but we must be mindful of what is being mobilised in our pursuit of them. My focus is education and I suggest that the provisions of the SDGs related specifically to that field suggest particular scaled interventions (or at least make those approaches particularly attractive). Scale exacts pressure on particular types of education.

As part of my association with the Centre for Research in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh (a version of this post appears there as well), I recently traveled with colleagues to deliver a three day workshop on digital education for Syrian academics who have been displaced by the conflict. The University has worked for a long time with the Council for At-Risk Academics (CARA), a great organisation providing urgently-needed help to academics in immediate danger, those forced into exile, and many who choose to work on in their home countries despite serious risks.

We seem to have endless ideas on how to use Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D). From job creation to women’s empowerment to civic participation, a number of ICT4D interventions have been developed and implemented over the years. Common question asked in my work is “what type of technology that might have biggest impact in our society in the coming years?”. As we have learned, ICTs in itself aren’t sufficient. While factors contributing to the success of ICT4D have become apparent, and many have written about them, I feel there's still a need to highlight some of them.

We have been some of the most vocal critics of Bridge International Academies (BIA), largely because most investigations and evaluations of their edtech impact to improve schooling in sub-Saharan Africa have been less than spectacular (many would say the impact is non-existent). So imagine our surprise to see Wayan Vota's latest ICTworks™ post highlighting the successes of BIA in Liberia.

We need to make women in innovation more visible, and correct the gender imbalance in the stories we tell. We need to tell more stories about the women working at the top of humanitarian innovation, and so today I sat down with Tanya Accone, Senior Advisor at UNICEF Innovation, to tell the story of a woman working at the top of a very visible humanitarian innovation team for a very visible humanitarian agency.

We do a lot of work on open learning as well and it was clear there was tension between these open educational platforms (like Coursera, edX, etc.) and their use in local contexts, particularly in emerging economies. There is tension there. Open educational technologies are too often framed as a transparent instrument for educational export, keeping (specifically Western or Global North) curricula, pedagogy, and educational values intact whilst they are broadcast to a global population in deficit.

I remember when I first started hearing the buzz about bots. My first thought? 'Here we go again...' - a reaction to the endless cycles of hype followed by business-as-usual that typifies the digital sector. However, over the past few months I've had the opportunity to design a few 'bots 4 good', and I'd like to share what I've learned: how they work, what they could be useful for, and where to start if you'd like to get one. I believe that done well, they could be really useful add-ons to your digital strategy as they provide a rich 'in-between' space for mobile users who aren't fully digitally literate.

Last week, I was at TICTeC 2018 where researchers, activists and practitioners discussed the impact of civic technology, or civic tech. This blogpost summarises the discussion of Two heads are better than one: working with governments.